Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
tweet.

The destruction of Jimmy Carr shows that medieval-style scapegoating has made a comeback

It was when Lily Allen got involved that I knew the anti-Jimmy Carr jamboree had spun out of control. Any bandwagon that is carrying Lily Allen, David Cameron, The Times, the Twittermob, Right-wingers, Left-wingers, tax collectors, theologians, comedians and my mum can't be a good thing. What we have here, in this orgiastic outpouring of counter-Carr sentiment, is a classic two-minute hate. Jimmy Carr is Emmanuel Goldstein.

The most alarming thing about this story is not Carr's tax-avoiding antics – stop the press! Well-off man seeks to remain well-off! – but rather the speed and intensity with which Carr became a moral punchbag for virtually every man, woman and child in Britain. Even Cameron, who has an entire economy to fix, couldn't wait to chuck in his penny's worth of thoughts on Jimmy's behaviour. That our Prime Minister thinks it is appropriate to make solemn pronouncements on a celebrity's banking habits is literally a thousand times more concerning and perplexing than anything Carr got up to.

This Carr-bashing, the borderline hysterical hounding of one funnyman for making loads of money, speaks to the new fashion for recession-related scapegoating. These days everyone, from the posh boys seated around distressed oak tables in Downing Street to the dreadlocked inhabitants of protest camps, is on the hunt for some greedy, swivel-eyed individual who might be held responsible for plunging Britain into penury. From bashing bankers to screaming at Philip Green, from moaning about the obscene wealth of footballers to weeping over Jimmy Carr's tax-dodging temerity, railing against allegedly immoral, licentious individuals has taken the place of analysing the social and economic underpinnings of the current crisis.

Sometimes the scapegoats are poor people, such as benefits cheats, and sometimes they are rich people, like Fred Goodwin. And sometimes they are both: Danny Alexander revealingly argued in yesterday's Sun that "rich tax dodgers like Jimmy Carr are as bad as dole cheats", showing how easily the search for wicked people we can stick pins into to make ourselves feel better about the recession can switch between the wealthy and the skint. But the motivation is the same every time. Whether it's Cameron issuing a statement on Jimmy Carr or radical protesters supergluing themselves to Philip Green's Topshop, the instinct is to indulge in cheap moral posturing against badly behaved individuals rather than examine the profound structural and moral rot at the heart of the British economy and in British capitalism more broadly.

Such scapegoating is a very pre-modern moral exercise. We are supposed to have moved beyond the idea that individual decadence is the cause of social crises. That idea had its heyday in the witch-hunty medieval era, when allegedly wicked individuals were often held up as the source of social distress and mass sorrow. Then, with the dawn of reason and enlightenment, we discovered that, in fact, the problems facing mankind are caused by social factors, not sin. Now, however, sin is making a comeback. Carr is a victim, not so much of his own stupidity, but of the terrifying return of the medieval urge to hurl tomatoes/tweets at depraved individuals, and in the process destroy those individuals, in order to make ourselves feel temporarily better about living in confused times.